


I'm Blue

by Spidermunkee



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Blue is always #1, Fluff, Galaxy Garrison, Hurt/Comfort, I'm Bad At Summaries, I'm Bad At Tagging, It's not really angst, Lance goes back in time, Langst, M/M, Time Travel, but it's not really fluff either, i have no idea what this creation is, shiro's love saves him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-11
Updated: 2017-05-11
Packaged: 2018-10-30 14:00:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10878258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spidermunkee/pseuds/Spidermunkee
Summary: When Lance is transported back in time by mysterious means, it's all he can do to find Blue.





	I'm Blue

In the quiet of the night, it was the blaring of a trumpet that woke him. _Ambush? Blue -_

Eyes open, Lance stared at the tile ceiling, so different but so familiar, like a dream he’d had years ago. “Up and at ‘em, cadets! I want you all in class in an hour!”

The trumpet tapered off to silence and then a muffled groan beside Lance’s bed - cot - startled him. Blearily, Hunk eyed him. “You’re really quiet right now. What’s up, man?”

Lance forced himself to take a breath. “I have no idea what is happening right now,” he said faintly, looking over to the window he and Hunk shared. It wasn’t possible, he thought in the dim light of morning. Not the familiar curve of a round window, no comforting constellations, no smell of deep disinfectant that permeated the castle air. Incredibly, unequivocally, he was back at the Garrison. _On Earth._

“Hunk, tell me you remember Yellow,” he gasped, eyes locked onto the desert brown and blue sky - _so blue, how he misses Blue_.

Hunk watched him with wide brown eyes. “Dude, what’s wrong with you?” He sat up, hair mussed and so, so young. The baby fat still clung to his cheeks, stubborn until his later years would force it off. His hair was still short, unbraided and loose around his forehead. He was still Hunk, but he wasn’t _Hunk_ and Lance didn’t know how to process it.

Somehow, he was able to take a shaky breath and gasp out, “Nothing, sorry, just a dream.”

Still eyeing him with concern, Hunk turned and started getting ready for his day, donning the Garrison’s orange and grey uniform. The colors were so wrong on him, and Lance fought not to say anything, to grab Hunk by the shoulders and demand what the frack was going on -

_Blue?! Where are you?!_

Lance forced himself to move, to dress in his old clothes, to not look in a mirror or at his hands. They weren’t the same hands. The scars on his thumbs from cutting alien vegetables every night with Hunk were gone. The callouses had yet to appear. His knuckles weren’t battered and scarred, and his nails were clean and neat. These were stranger’s hands. Not his.

A sigh out and he searched his mind for the Garrison tech knowledge he’d managed to mostly forget. Ah, right, that was how he turned on the sink. He washed his face and hands, splashing the coldest water he could just to see if he could wake himself up. He must be dreaming. This wasn’t real, he wasn’t alone back at the Garrison with not-Hunk and _no Blue._

He needed his lion. He was so used to her flowy presence, buoyancy for his thoughts. She was his steady mountain pool, and without her he was as dry as the desert he stared at -

_The desert._

That’s where he’d found Blue last time. She was under the cave, preaches and witnesses about her carved into the entrances. He needed her.

He made plans to go find her that night, while the rest of the Garrison was sleeping, while _Hunk_ was sleeping. Because this wasn’t his Hunk, the man he’d grown up with, fighting battle after battle in a never ending war. Hunk wouldn’t understand him, this time around. They’d be out of sync, no longer two halves of a whole, the legs of Voltron.

His day started like any day at the Garrison, but it had been so long that most of it seemed new to him.

“Cadet Lance McClain,” Iverson shouted, “Bring you and your team to the simulator.”

Oh man, it was the day Hunk threw up in the simulator and he lost a wing. What to do? Do it again like he remembered it? Or ace it and have praise finally spill from Iverson’s lips?

In the end, Lance would always choose praise.

He hopped into the pilot seat, buckling himself up securely. He waited for the doors to close behind Hunk and Pidge to flash them a mischievous smile. Hunk groaned as he sat down and Pidge scowled at him. The beginning was alway the easiest part to any simulator, and Lance guided them to the planet steady and slow. “Galaxy Garrison flight log five eleven fourteen, begin descent to Kerberos for a rescue mission,” he stated calmly, easing on the controls.

Hunk and Pidge were silent behind him when the shuttle glided smoothly down to the moon. He could tell Hunk was a little incredulous at how serious he was being, and Lance desperately wished Hunk would just play it off as his “bad dream” from last night.

The radar in front of Pidge dinged reassuringly, and she turned to say, “We’ve picked up a distress beacon.”

“Alright, look alive team. Pidge: check coordinates,” Lance ordered, smiling.

“Copy,” the girl said, turning back around and typing on her computer.

The shuttle shook and Lance barked at Hunk, “We’ve got a hydraulic stabilizer out.”

“O-okay,” Hunk said uncertainly, and Lance knew he was feeling the effects. Hopefully since Lance didn’t jog the shuttle this time, Hunk would be able to hold it until they were done. Hopefully.

The big guy unbuckled himself to crawl over to the machine’s motherboard, groaning as he opened the lid. “I’ve lost contact,” Pidge said over the piercing alarm. “The shaking is interfering with our sensors.”

“I’m on it,” Hunk groaned, and his fingers dived into the motherboard to fiddle with wires. He managed to swallow down his vomit this time around and crawled back to his seat, just as Lance spotted the signal on his viewing screen.

“Preparing for approach on visual,” he said, waiting until Hunk was strapped in to take a smooth dive. Hunk fiddled with his mechanical layout on his computer screen for a few seconds, and the shaking and alarm stopped. “Pidge, let them know their ride is here.”

Pidge unbuckled herself and stood to grab the mic for their radio. “Attention Lunar Vessel,” she started, and Lance interrupted her to say, “What are you doing? Buckle your belt.” She scowled at him and sat with a huff, strapping herself back in. “Attention Lunar Vessel, this is Galaxy Garrison rescue craft one six three tango. Coming in for landing and extraction.”

Lance smiled at how smoothly this was going, and he pulled up at the controls to fly over the overhang just ahead and then pushed them gently to ease them into a landing. Perfect.

As the simulator ended, Lance waited with his team as Iverson frowned down at him, holding a clipboard. Lance’s smile couldn’t get much bigger. “It seems we’ve got ourselves a new Keith Kogane,” Iverson said. Lance’s smile dropped. “It’ll do, Cadet. Move along for the next team.”

Four hours later had Lance and Hunk in their shared room. Lance had gotten Hunk to dress for what Lance called a “night out” but was really the start of the rest of their lives. Hunk grudgingly got ready with him, and Lance left him to change while he entered the bathroom. As he turned on the sink to wash his face, he noticed deep bruises on his wrists that weren’t there before, and when he looked up into the mirror he shrieked. Shiro was standing behind him, brown eyes anguished and earnest.

“Shiro!” he gasped, turning so fast he almost had whiplash. “How? What?”

“Lance,” Shiro said, and his voice was muffled as if Lance was hearing him through water. “You can’t go to Blue, Lance -”

“Hey, Lance, buddy, you okay?” Hunk called and Lance flinched. When his eyes opened again, Shiro was gone.

“Y-Yeah,” Lance called back while eyeing his clear wrists. “Sorry, a spider crawled over my hands.”

“Ew,” Hunk answered, and Lance laughed at him as they exited the room.

Seeing Shiro in the video again after the scare in his bathroom not even an hour earlier was the freakiest thing Lance had ever experienced -

\- Recalling the smelly jellyfish forced onto his head a few years back (or forward), Lance had to amend that statement.

“We have to rescue him,” Lance said firmly.

“But how?” Pidge asked before Hunk started on his spiel of nervousness.

“We need a distraction,” Lance said, and waited for the inevitable explosions to light up the night sky. When they sounded he made sure to point Keith out amongst the chaos. “Let’s go!”

Lance busted into the tent, eyes trained onto Shiro. “I’m helping you,” he said quickly, grabbing Shiro’s other arm and draping it over his shoulders, ignoring the cold metal where there should be warm flesh.

“Who’re you?” Keith demanded, and Lance sighed through his nose.

“I’m Lance, and we don’t have time right now! We have to get him out of here.”

Grudgingly Keith started forward, in tandem with Lance, and they loaded Shiro onto Keith’s gravity jet. “Why am I holding this guy?” Pidge demanded, and again Lance ignored her. He could tell she was getting frustrated with him, but really he just wanted to get Shiro out of there.

“Can this thing go any faster?” Hunk yelped when the Garrison Humvees started closing in on them.

“We could toss off some nonessential weight,” Keith yelled back and Lance scowled at him. Still Keith. Still blunt, rude, tactless Keith. He was lucky he’d saved Lance once or twice (at least a hundred times) in the future. When Lance glanced up, there were no stars in the sky, just an endless blackness. Before he could process how weird that was, Keith yelled, “Big man, lean left!”

After taking out all of the Humvees and jumping the same cliff they did last time, Lance hopped down from the gravity jet to stretch his legs. He helped Pidge take Shiro’s form into the house, leaning him down on the couch. Waiting for him to wake up was going to be torture.

Lance had just dozed off on the floor in the corner when a hand shook him awake. He started, hand reaching for his bayard, fingers closing on nothing. He reached for Blue in a panic, and when he didn’t feel her he leaped to his feet, teeth bared in a snarl.

“Whoa, man,” he heard Hunk say. Lance’s eyes focused on the boy after a second, and he was back to being startled at how _young_ Hunk was. “Hey, if you’re done growling at me like an animal, Shiro’s awake.”

Lance’s snarl dropped and he stood straighter. “Sorry,” he said. “I was having the weirdest dream.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Hunk chortled, and Lance followed him to the couch. Shiro and Keith walked inside after their bro talk, and Lance compared him to the Shiro he knew in the future, with a full head of hair and a short beard, eyes still as kind as ever. This Shiro was a little gaunter than the Shiro Lance remembered, a little more haunted, but that was to be expected. He did just get rescued from the Garrison after being tortured by aliens for a year.

Lance ignored the conversation around him for the most part, just focused on taking in Shiro’s face, his demeanor. He was shaken from his thoughts when a hand entered his field of vision. “Lance, right?” Shiro asked him, and Lance swallowed against the pang in his gut. Having Shiro not remember him was almost worse than having Hunk not remember him.

“Yeah,” he answered, grasping that hand -

\- His eyes stung and he jerked against the hands holding him down, wrists locked together by advanced cuffs, used to block out quintessence. He shook and eyed the dark room he was in, the shouted words of, “He’s coming out of it, put him back under!”

He blinked heavily.

They were in the desert, and while Lance couldn’t remember getting there, he did know that something wasn’t right. He couldn’t feel Blue in his mind, which was weird since all he needed to do was broadcast his quintessence like he did when he was still living on Earth. But for some reason it wasn’t reaching her, or maybe her quintessence wasn’t reaching him.

They all walked along the desert pathways, following Hunk’s homemade Geiger counter for Blue. Lance lingered in the back, and Shiro turned to him as the others walked ahead.

“Lance,” he said, and Lance looked at him curiously. He almost balked at the intense focus Shiro aimed his way. “Lance, you can’t go to Blue,” he said, and Lance stumbled back a few steps. Shiro crowded him towards the rock wall behind him, hands on either side of his head, sliding a knee between Lance’s legs. “You’re in danger. Don’t go to Blue - remember -”

Shiro’s mouth was on him then, rough and demanding and thrilling. Lance arched into him, fingers clasping his vest, opening his mouth to let Shiro in, to taste him with tongue and lips and teeth. He moaned heavily when Shiro’s thigh pushed against his cock. Lance was hard immediately, relishing in the feel of Shiro’s heavy weight against him, his sweaty forelock brushing Lance’s forehead and thick fingers running up and down Lance’s sides. His touch was demanding and impatient and Lance rocked onto Shiro’s leg, rutting against him like a dog in heat.

“Shiro,” he gasped when Shiro’s mouth left his to trail down his neck and up to his ear.

“Remember, Lance,” he whispered, teeth tugging Lance’s earlobe. “Remember.”

And he was gone.

Lance blinked his eyes open to see Shiro ten feet away from him, looking at him curiously. “Is everything okay?” he asked. “You look a little tired.”

Lance nodded his head, sighing heavily and straightening himself out. “Yeah, just took a breather for a second. Sorry.”

Shiro’s smile was beatific. “It’s not a problem.”

Inside of the cave, Lance touched a hand to Blue’s carvings the first chance he got, and when they didn’t light up, he found himself worried. Blue should have responded to him by now. She should have reached out to him like he was reaching out for her. He turned -

“He’s coming out of it again!”

Voices whispered and the lights cut into Lance’s retinas painfully. _Blue_ , his mind cried out helplessly. Someone injected him and he fell still.

When Lance blinked his eyes again, they were underground, and he was looking up at Blue. She was as beautiful as ever, with her ever-present kindness and love. He started forward, determined to reach her, to meld with her once more -

“Lance,” Shiro rasped, and his arms enclosed around Lance’s waist, holding him still. “Please, you have to remember.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about - Shiro, please, I need her, let me go to her -”

“You can’t, Lance.” Lance stilled at the pure anguish in Shiro’s voice. “I’m so sorry, but if you go to her, you’ll die. I can’t let you.”

Lance turned in Shiro’s arms, fingers raising to trace over eyes and nose and lips. He kissed Shiro softly, smiling sadly. “Blue comes first, Shiro,” he said quietly, and Shiro shuddered against him in heartache. “Just like Black comes first, Blue will always come first.”

With that Lance removed himself from Shiro’s arms, and in a blink he was there, staring up at Blue’s towering form. He opened his mind as wide as he could, reached out to her with everything he had in him -

Lance screamed, thrashing in his bonds, shouting, “Blue! Blue! _Blue!_ ”

A roar answered his call, and a familiar form was breaking down the wall, smashing Lance’s enemies, and snatching him into safety.

A half hour later had Lance sitting next to Shiro in the Castle of Lions, fingers intertwined. “What happened in there?” Shiro asked.

“They wanted to get to Blue through me,” Lance answered. He sighed softly, letting his head rest upon the couch behind him. “They made me think I was back at the Garrison, when it all started and I found her for the first time.”

“How did you beat it?” Shiro asked after a moment of silence.

“You helped me,” Lance answered. Shiro’s stunned expression made him smile genially. “All of us are always connected, right? But you’re my closest connection, and your desperation and love reached out to me. Because of you I realized what was happening, and I was able to connect to Blue with enough strength to fight them off.”

Shiro grinned at him underneath his short beard, soft hair falling around his neck. It was the most beautiful sight Lance had ever seen.

Besides Blue, of course.


End file.
